For a Chef: A Life Lesson

You are not going to believe what happened to me today. This being my first official blog post for Inside Scoop, I wasn’t really sure where to jump off with each other, but after today, doing one of the realist things I’ve ever done as a chef, I promise to give it to you like it is. The real, the beautiful and sometimes messy world of being a professional chef. Like it or not, here it is … I watched 32 cows die today.

Let me give you the back story. I’m posting this from Ft. Worth Texas, in the lobby of the downtown Omni. Doing what after 15 years on television I’m pretty good at, and that’s sitting around and waiting. Waiting for my town car, my next flight, the slow guy at Starbucks, a camera repo, yada yada. My car is on the way as I’m wrapping up my day in Ft. Worth, shooting a piece with Food Network for my new show, The Great Food Truck Race, coming out in August. Our guest on the show is a very good friend of mine: the owner of the award winning Ft. Worth restaurant the Lonesome Dove, the very talented, Chef Tim Love.

We shot a piece in his restaurant this morning about Texas beef. In between takes, we had a conversation off camera about “West Coast” Marin, grass fed cattle vs. the slightly sweeter Texas cattle that’s finished on corn. Marin and Sonoma beef which, after a quick phone call with Bill Niman, I found out are fed on native rye grass, legumes and clover, which are high in phosphorus and calcium. Both of which are very important for intramuscular fat development, or what chefs call marbling. (Marin and Sonoma grass fed beef are going on my menu at Wayfare Tavern next month when we open and I’m in love with it.)

Tim said that he loves grass fed beef but it depends on what kind of grass we’re talking about. He went on to say that the plus of ranching in Texas was the land, the minus was the quality of the grass that they feed on. Texas is well above 90 degrees most days in the summer when most cattle are being fattened for slaughter. They’re put out in the fields to graze or as they call it in cow country, “lawn mowing.” Texas grass is brown and sun scorched, virtually stripped of its nutrients. The dead grass gives cattle ranchers little option but to move to dried grains in order to feed their cows.

I learned that Texans tend to prefer the taste of grass fed cattle that are finished on calorie dense dried grains. And because Tim is an investor in two cattle ranches near his restaurant, he dictates what the cows eat. He has rye grass planted in the grazing fields every year, which gives him the ultimate quality control in the product he serves at his restaurants, from the ground up.

I know about factory farming and what I saw later wasn’t that. As Michael Pollan points out in his book Omnivore’s Dilemma — and what a lot of chefs take issue with — is the fact that the two chambered Bovine stomach is not meant to digest corn or grain. Cattle are grass eaters. Once weaned, a strict corn diet creates a bloated, sometimes sick cow that gives off tons of methane. Often they have to be propped up on antibiotics just to make it to slaughter. Tim’s decision to invest in the ranch where he gets his beef from is one of the most interesting approaches to quality control I’ve ever heard of.

Back at the shoot after a few retakes, the crew repositioned to another location and Tim and I head off in his black Range Rover to literally the wrong side of the tracks – an off neighborhood in Ft. Worth’s industrial part of town.

We tucked in behind a security fence just off of North Grove St into a large building complex that houses Frontier Meats. An 80,000 sq. ft. all natural meat company with a slaughterhouse capable of processing a thousand large animals a day, everything from cattle, boar, venison, ostrich and bison. Most of which I saw in various forms of production. The air smelled sharp and slightly acidic like the unglamorous underbelly of modern consumption.

Tim and I shook hands with a good friend of his from Frontier Meats, who was nice enough to give us an hour of his time. We suited up into food safe rubber boots, hair nets, lab coats and hard hats. We scrubbed our hands, stepped into an antibacterial solution pooled in a sided rubber mat laid in front of a door labeled “Kill Floor”.